Peter Hallman in his remarks on grammar and eloquence reassures Gross, Kravchenko and Dalrymple about the awareness among linguists that 'there is more to language than grammar'. Although this was not exactly the point of the discussion and the kind of awareness Hallman mentions wasn't contested, I find it hard to resist making a few comments on his own statements about grammar.

Hallman insists that 'disembodiedness of grammar is a core methodological tenet, based on the premise, endemic in modern sciences, that insight into the nature of a totality can be gained by decomposing it into its component parts and studying them separately.'' There is another way to say this: ''Long live analytism!'' And Hallman is unquestionably and fatally wrong assuming that analysis into components can lead to revealing truths about their totality. Actually, it works the other way around - at least, in biology (or isn't it a modern science?). In biology, the more complex the level at which one seeks to explain a living system, the greater the need to examine the network of interactions that lie behind the genome. As emphasized by Cornish-Bowden et al. (2004: 716), ''the fact that a complex network of interactions connect genes to phenotypes emphasizes the idea that only through the understanding of the whole can we understand the function of the parts''. A holistic approach to language assumes its biological nature: language is viewed as a biological phenomenon uniquely characteristic of the species homo sapiens. Yet in formal linguistics (such as generative grammar) there is a profound lack of understanding language as a whole, and the question ''What is language for?'' has never seemed to be a priority (and this is, by the way, what Dalrymple spoke about). As linguists, we should not forget that language is a kind of biologically grounded adaptive behavior. Regrettably, linguistics, as represented by major schools of thought over the 20th century, appears to have had very little in common with biological science - except, of course, the generativist claim that language is a 'mental organ'.

So one shouldn't really be surprised at the staggering parallels of the kind drawn by Hallman between grammar and chemistry. The fact that a molecule of water consists of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen (H2O), each of which is a gas, and the fact that hydrogen is a highly flammable substance while oxygen is the component that makes combustion possible, do not of themselves help understand how a particular structural combination of the two elements yields a substance (water) so radically different as to be used to put out fires! No, it's not just molecules after all!

'Disembodied' ('formal', 'generative', etc.) grammar, understood as something that can be singled out as a universal 'invariant among human beings', as a totality of molecules that can be formed using a limited set of components, is a fiction, a stark delusion rooted in Cartesian dualism and based on Alan Turing's infamous metaphor 'thinking is computation'. For people like Pinker, grammar is ''a code or protocol or a set of rules that specifies how words may be arranged into meaningful combinations'' (Pinker 1999: 4). This code (also known as 'language faculty') sits in everyone's head, and the mind 'works by words and rules' or, more generally, 'by lookup and computation' (ibid.: 21). But language is NOT A CODE (Kravchenko 2007).The generativist notion of 'grammar' as 'generalizations about what constitutes a grammatical syntactic format in a language independently of what speakers choose to express with those formats' is so outlandish that one doesn't even know how to begin about exposing it as totally invalid. Surely, this discussion forum is not quite the place for that.